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Simple Python library for HTML parsing

Project description

Leaf
====

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What is this?
-------------

This is a simple wrapper around `lxml <http://lxml.de/>`_ which adds some nice
features to make working with lxml better. This library covers all my needs in
HTML parsing.

Dependencies
------------

`lxml <http://lxml.de/>`_ obviously :3

Features
--------

* Nice jquery-like CSS selectors
* Simple access to element attributes
* Easy way to convert HTML to other formats (bbcode, markdown, etc.)
* A few nice functions for working with text
* And, of course, all original features of lxml

Description
-----------

The main function of the module (for my purposes) is ``leaf.parse``.
This function takes an HTML string as argument, and returns a ``leaf.Parser``
object, which wraps an lxml object.

With this object you can do anything you want, for example::

document = leaf.parse(sample)
# get the links from the DIV with id 'menu' using CSS selectors
links = document('div#menu a')

Or you can do this::

# get first link or return None
link = document.get('div#menu a')

And you can get attributes from these results like this::

print link.onclick

You can also use standard lxml methods like ``object.xpath``,
and they return results as ``leaf.Parser`` objects.

My favorite feature is parsing HTML into bbcode (markdown, etc.)::

# Let's define simple formatter, which passes text
# and wraps links into [url][/url] (like bbcode)
def omgcode_formatter(element, children):
# Replace <br> tag with line break
if element.tag == 'br':
return '\n'
# Wrap links into [url][/url]
if element.tag == 'a':
return u"[url=link}]{text}[/url]".format(link=element.href, text=children)
# Return children only for other elements.
if children:
return children

This function will be recursively called with element and children (this is
string with children parsing result).

So, let's call this parser on some ``leaf.Parser`` object::

document.parse(omgcode_formatter)

More detailed examples available in the tests.

Finally, this library has some nice functions for working with text:

``to_unicode``
Convert string to unicode string

``strip_accents``
Strip accents from a string

``strip_symbols``
Strip ugly unicode symbols from a string

``strip_spaces``
Strip excess spaces from a string

``strip_linebreaks``
Strip excess line breaks from a string
Change log
==========

1.0.1
===
- 100% test coverage
- fixed bug in result wrapping (etree._Element has __iter__ too!)

1.0
---
- add python3 support
- first production release

0.4.4
-----
- fix inner_html method
- added **kwargs to the parse function, added inner_html method to the Parser class
- cssselect in deps

0.4.2
-----
- Node attribute modification via node.href = '/blah'
- Custom default value for get: document.get(selector, default=None)
- Get element by index: document.get(selector, index)

0.4.1
-----
- bool(node) returns True if element exists and False if element is None

0.4
---
- First public version

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